


Arbitrary

by zeuswrites



Series: Guns Go Off When I Enter The Building [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 08:53:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1544924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeuswrites/pseuds/zeuswrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A one-shot about how growing up in a vault can mess you up re: the sky and other curiosities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arbitrary

The roof creaked under Eveline’s weight as she swung her legs over the edge. It was a beautiful morning - not the sort of beautiful mornings the books back at the Vault promised her, with birds chirping, sunlight seeping through greenery, and the Milkman’s truck passing by; those kinds of morning felt like an abstract concept when she was looking at first rays of sunlight slipping through holes and dents in Megaton walls. 

She leaned back and looked at the street below. Everybody was asleep, even the Children of the Atom. There was no talking, laughter, screaming, footsteps; at 4 am, you could hear Megaton itself.

It sounded terrifying. You were suddenly aware of how noisy this place is, that you live in constant creaking of bending buildings, scraping of rusty metal, and was that sound a bursting pipe, or water dripping onto metal? The place seemed to be seconds away rom collapsing into a scrap heap right under Eveline’s ass. Made her move like a burglar at night, walking slowly and carefully on her toes, freezing at every louder sound. 

Still, nice morning.

She looked up, letting her head fall between her shoulders. Amazing how one year ago she nearly pissed herself when she saw what was waiting for her outside the Vault door, how she sat for hours in the cave passage before she convinced herself that she’s going to have to find food and water sometime; and now she was willingly sitting on a rooftop (a rooftop - another thing she got used to so quickly. That ceilings could  _have an outside_ ), looking up into nothing above her. 

The sky made her feel so small. She often caught herself treating the world like a closed space, like there were walls far away and a ceiling up there, and she was just so tiny that she wouldn’t see it. She knew otherwise, but didn’t understand. She probably never would. To her, the sky was a lid on the box, but in moments like this - not a single cloud on the horizon and way too much time to think about stupid things - she felt like she might start falling upwards.

She shuddered. The days were hot now, chasing everyone out of their metal houses until nightfall, but it was chilly at this hour, and she didn’t bother throwing on a shirt before coming up here. This fresh, crisp coldness was another thing she never knew before, and she was starting to appreciate it. 

In the Vault, you breathed the same air as your grandparents did when they first entered it, over and over again. She was always aware of the air in there, like it was molasses. Or formaline. Like they were all suspended in it. But there was so much air here, so much of it that everyone had their  _own._ And it kept changing - cold, hot, dry, moist, it didn’t need a technician to set different parameters for it. It felt like a… force of nature, she supposed. She was starting to understand what this phrase meant.

No wonder everyone thought she was a weirdo. 

There were first signs of movement around town now; Jenny Stahl was sweeping the street in front of the bar, and Gob opened the door to Moriarty’s Saloon. She could see him across town, carrying crates of empty bottles out the front door and stacking them along the walls. She considered shouting to him, but realized she would wake half the town, so she waited until he turned around towards her house instead, flinching nervously when he saw her. She waved at him, and he waved back before going back to work. 

There were so many things here that she didn’t think were possible. Still didn’t think so, even after seeing it with her own eyes.

If you didn’t like someone, you could walk away and never see them again.

Sometimes the air was hot and stuffy, and sometimes water was falling from the sky, and sunsets told you what to expect tomorrow.

There were people out there who never heard her name before. 

Should it happen, she could die by  _falling from a height._ It still pissed her off, that there were heights  _everywhere_  big enough to die because of them.

And she could walk all day, and the next day, and she still wouldn’t run out of things she hasn’t seen before.

Life up there felt alien. Arbitrary. Like it made up rules on the fly. She didn’t know how everyone did this; how they dealt with this constant uncertainity, this freedom - and the ensuing responsibility for the choices they make or don’t. But right in this moment, watching sun creep over that shanty-ass, stubborn town, Eveline was at peace with it, like the “it” to get was right outside her grasp, and she would suddenly see the world the same way these people born under nothing did.

 It never happened, of course. It wouldn’t, not after a childhood and youth spend on learning a competely different way of thinking. But as she got up from the cold roof and started dusting rust off her ass, she admitted to herself that this world was infinitely more interesting than the one in her mind, and she was hoping to go insane for it one day.


End file.
